Biographies

About the Tutors/Group Leaders

Our main tutors are Gaie Houston, Thom Osborn & Michael Soth.

They bring to these events:

• many decades of group, organisational and teaching experience.
• a wealth of relevant knowledge and skills including the very latest global trends in psychology.
• an integrative stance which embraces the best from the whole spectrum of groupwork and leadership approaches available.

They all have seasoned track records in the field of individual and group psychology, facilitation, training and leadership, and a passion for working in groups. They are being joined by a growing number of well-known associates and experts in the field of organisational development, leadership and group work, currently Professor Susan Weil, Professor Andrew Samuels and Lynsey Hotchkies.

Gaie Houston

Gaie Houston, first trained in the US at National Training Laboratories, has a long career in management training and organisational consultancy, ranging from the voluntary sector, through an advertising agency, to a long intervention in the merger of two famous London hospitals. She has taught and practised Gestalt groupwork and therapy since 1975, in the UK and in other countries, and is currently a senior lecturer at The Gestalt Centre, London. She teaches and practices clinical supervision, and mentors chief executives and other staff in a range of organisations. She chairs the Board of Gestalt Publications Ltd, and is on the editorial Board of other journals.

Gaie has written many radio plays, also for TV and theatre, and has directed four operas in England and Italy. She has presented three TV series on human behaviour, and over the years has written a number of books on related subjects. She is also the author of some well-known and influential books on individual, group and organisational behaviour. Visit Gaie’s website for more details about her work.

Thom Osborn

I started my professional life as a doctor and psychiatrist. After a few years (perhaps because my father died of cancer at the early age of 52) I stopped being a doctor. I then worked in the theatre as director and writer and occasional performer. After running some role-playing and improvisation workshops for the Organisation Change Unit of the Management Department of what was then the Polytechnic of North London, I was invited to co-lead some training groups, and soon became a lecturer there, for some years.

During that time I formed an alliance with John Southgate. We changed the work of the unit from what was conventional T-group training (derived from the National Training Laboratory in the USA via the Management Department at Leeds), to a very different format: a two-year Diploma course in group-work and organisation development, for mature students coming from a variety of organisations.

It was based on a model of self-direction and collective decision-making, with the plenary as the place where this social organism determined its shape and its programme as a learning community. An important influence was the work of some Danish colleagues, especially Gunnar Hjelholdt, who pioneered what he called the 'mini-society', as a way of understanding organisations and influencing their development. I extended this work at South-West London College with courses forming large groups, developing a design structure for self-directed, collective decision-making learning with Brigid Procter in the Counselling Skills courses.

I am proud of my part in these two courses, which were landmarks at the time and remain models for this way of working. Some articles by me from this time can be found here.

I lost energy for continuing in this field with the hefty return of the trendy right - bringing imposed targets and a return to a more old-style management, both in organisation and education - during the 1980s. I worked again in theatre and in film, writing, directing and performing (including my own solo show), and in circus - learning trapeze in late middle-age. I never regretted giving up the practice of medicine, but I continue to regret having eventually to give up the trapeze due to my own ageing process!

It seems a good time now, a necessary time, to return to the work of the organisation, to its inner workings and how these relate to both the inner workings of ourselves as individuals and the workings of the larger world outside.

Michael Soth

Michael has been involved with groups, their dynamics, their facilitation and facilitation training since the late 1970's. He first got involved with self-directing learning communities in the late 1980's on the counselling courses at South-West London College. Having learnt and then practiced and taught an integrative form of Body Psychotherapy over the last 25 years, he is keen to bring a similarly wide-ranging integration of approaches to the field of group work, including perspectives as varied and opposed as Group Analysis, Gestalt and Field Theory, Yalom's Group Therapy, Open Space technology, Hellinger's constellations, Mindell's Process-oriented Psychology, complexity and fractal theory, Psychodrama, Deep Ecology amongst others. Recent writing on groups includes a chapter on “Group Body Psychotherapy”, which can be found in our growing articles section.

For details of other papers and publications visit Michael’s website.

Much of Michael’s work and writing over the last two decades has been concerned with establishing the principles of 21st-century psychology, based on an integral bodymind understanding of human beings and their relationships, and he is considered an original and innovative thinker by his colleagues.

He has been supervising and mentoring business and OD consultants as well as coaches and facilitators since 2000, making available depth psychological principles to leaders and organisations. Through this work and his networks of colleagues and associates in the fields of consulting and coaching, he has a solid grasp of current practice in these fields.

Events Calendar 2009

Articles & Papers

Our tutors have written a number of books, articles and papers, relevant to groupwork, facilitation, leadership and the history of learning communities. Gaie has published some highly recommended books on working with groups.

Books by Gaie Houston

The Red Book of Groups, and How to Lead Them Better

By Gaie Houston

This book is dedicated to the many counsellors, trainers, managers, lecturers, nurses, social and community workers, doctors, supervisors, clerics, teachers, and others, who find themselves running some kind of informal supportive group, and would like to do it better.

Information technology is no substitute for presence, contact, and shared activity. So, paradoxically, modern technology increases the need for face-to-face groups in which what goes on between people is looked at and perhaps changed for the better. Here is a down-to-earth description of some likely experiences in such groups, the theory behind what is going on, and exercises on topics from co-operating to confronting, from fantasy to finishing.

The Group Alive

[formerly: “Being and Belonging”]

By Gaie Houston

Published by The Rochester Foundation.

(ISBN 0 9510323 7 2).

Gaie Houston writes: "Reviewers from analytic and various humanistic schools were flatteringly enthusiastic about this book, when it first appeared in 1993, under the title "Being and Belonging". The book remains, but I have now called it "The Group Alive", as this seems to convey more clearly what it is about. It is a story, as well as a commentary on some of the obvious, and more of the subterranean, currents, that generate emotion and behaviour in and between groups."

Associates and Co-Leaders

Professor Susan Weil

Susan has 30 years experience in designing and facilitating learning and change in complex systems and situations. She has worked across many cultural, practice, organisational and community boundaries to support learning that brings diverse people together to discover shared purposes and values, and how they can make more of a difference in partnership based on ongoing collaborative action inquiry and research. She has always been excited about improving learning to learn processes in the face of difficult situations that arise out of our lived experience. Over the years, she has developed collaborative action inquiry and participative action-research-based learning approaches that stay connected to the ground of that lived experience and to the complex fields of which we are always a part, never apart.
In 1996, Susan founded SOLAR (Social and Organisational Learning as Action Research), first situated at the University of Leicester and Northampton, and later at the University of the West of England. This initiative attracted pioneering thinkers such as Fritjof Capra, Ralph Stacey and Patricia Shaw, Gareth Morgan, Donald Schon, and many others to participate (http://www.uwe.ac.uk/solar/Events/Forums.htm). As leader and director of an income-generating centre, she did pioneering work with the NHS, the BBC, the EU on youth unemployment, and around many other public sector and social issues. She also introduced systemic and action inquiry to the Office for Public Management (1991-1996) where she was a senior consultant and specialist lead, working with senior managers and professionals throughout the public and community sector.
Thanks to her extensive experience, she has developed a powerful capability to approach large systems and to design and facilitate effective change processes. In particular, she is able to allow for a diversity of perspectives, coming from a variety of stakeholders, to converge into a coherent whole, finding solid, effective and sustainable paths which positively impact multiple bottom lines.

 

Professor Andrew Samuels

Andrew Samuels is a well-known psychotherapist who was elected one of the first group of six Honorary Fellows of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. He is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and holds visiting chairs at New York, London and Roehampton universities. His many books have been translated into 19 languages. Andrew has - through his company TELOS - worked as a consultant for DelMonte, Nokia, Tesco, the cities of Tokyo and St Petersburg, the Labour Party and political groupings in the United States, South Africa, Poland, Russia and Israel, the National Health Service, interfaith groups, and several organizations in the therapy and counselling field.

 

Lynsey Hotchkies

Lynsey trained as a Gestalt counsellor, then as a group analytic psychotherapist. She works in a variety of settings with different types of groups including therapy groups, student groups and support groups. She is Programme Manager at Westminster Pastoral Foundation Therapy for the group analytic psychotherapy training, as well as the introductory courses. In this role she directly manages 15-20 part-time staff. She is particularly interested in group dynamics and how we focus so little on ourselves as 'group members' in terms of thinking about our relationships and organisational roles.

Prior to training as a therapist Lynsey worked for 9 years as a lawyer, starting out as a barrister and later qualifying and working in New York as an attorney.